Welcome!

Thank you for visiting the blog for Ipaja Community Link (ICL), a small community-based organisation in Lagos, Nigeria, working towards creating a prosperous, healthy and empowered community in Ipaja.

The main activities of ICL are:
- skills vocational training for women and young people in basic cooking, sewing and bead-making
- youth and community volunteering
- community health education, awareness and support
- community care initiatives

ICL specifically aims to support and empower women, people living with HIV/AIDs, young people, and orphans and vulnerable children.

The following information is representative of the work of ICL and reflects the views of staff, volunteers and those that ICL are working with.

ICL is working hard to make poverty a thing of the past in Ipaja - no one in the community is asking for a handout; they are simply looking for ways to make their lives better, to provide for their families and to secure their future. For more information, please call 0702 969 8523, 0706 155 0665 or 0705 636 9269 (or add +234 if calling from the UK) or email icl@difn.org.uk.

Please read on... (and here's a tip: it might be best if you read from the bottom, for older posts, to the top, for newer posts)...

Thursday 25 June 2009

And then we increased Ipaja Community Link's income by almost 10%...

Recently, Ipaja Community Link (ICL) acquired an extra N250,000 (£1,000) funding after a fundraising drive on Red Nose Day in March by Children's International School in Lekki, Lagos. The school raised over N1,000,000 during their fundraiser and donated half of the money to share between ICL and People Against HIV and AIDS in the Barracks (PAHAB). Jennifer and Heather, both VSO volunteers with ICL and PAHAB, collected the money during their Africa-themed assembly at the school on Friday 5 June.

The fundraiser was co-ordinated by Lucy Jennings and Natalie Ghazi, from the UK, who are primary school teachers at the school. Lucy and Natalie visited the work of ICL and PAHAB earlier this year and wanted to see what they could do to raise money for children in Lagos who are less privileged than those who attend Children's International School. They were deeply moved when they visited Iba Community Primary School where PAHAB does a lot of work with orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC). There are over 700 children in the school, with many classes bursting at the seams with over 150 per classroom, and with no toilets and no safe drinking water. Both PAHAB and ICL will use the money raised as part of their existing OVC programmes. ICL intends to use the money to help with the running of its Saturday programme for OVCs and for the expanded programme which includes school attendance grants and nutritional support for extremely vulnerable children and families in Ipaja. Some of the money will also be donated to Baruwa Community Primary School - recent campaigning by ICL resulting in the renovation of the school; however, much work is still to be done by constructing toilets and building new classrooms.

As well as raising money, the children in the school also went home and collected lots of resources for the children of Ipaja and Iba, such as clothes, shoes, books, stationary and toys. The pupils of Children's International School were delighted to have collected so many resources and were eager to assist with packing them into the van destined for the mainland of Lagos - over two hours drive from Lekki. This money, however, is just the start. N250,000 is an amazing amount of money to have raise to assist our programmes, but much much more money is needed. Pupils at Baruwa Community Primary School (seen below) needs at least four new classrooms, modern toilets and a functioning bore hole (the government recently installed a bore hole, but with no means of electricity to pump it). ICL aims to facilitate this process, not to lead it, hoping for matched funding from other organisations, such as Rotary and community leaders, to ensure a sustainable development programme.

1 comment:

  1. This is great news. Thanks to Lucy and Natalie for their great work in helping to raise this much needed cash! On behalf of DIFN Uk, I thank you and I am encouraged by your fantastic support to our work in ICL.

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